In a 2014 Accenture Study, 76% of patients surveyed felt that pharmaceutical companies had a responsibility to provide information and services that help patients manage their own health. What we have seen in the past decade is that an increasingly complex web of payer policy restrictions and requirements have transformed these conversations from ‘how do I take my medication?’ to ‘how can I get my medication?’

Using Compassion as a Design Element

Today’s patients are moving faster than our systems. In a world expecting real-time personalized support, the most compassionate thing we can do is to rebuild our most demanding workflows in a way that truly honors their urgency. Using compassion as a design element is necessary, because even though patients don’t see our internal systems and platforms, they feel them.

The Hard Questions

As an industry leader, we have created a list of hard questions from the patient’s perspective:

• How consistent is my experience from one call to the next?
• Do they have a complete understanding of my journey as a patient?
• Does this experience feel ‘world-class? Is it fast, accurate, flexible, and most importantly, effective?
• Was the engagement proactive?

Operational excellence is a journey, not an overnight destination

As an organization, we have been on a 30-year long journey to achieve, and more importantly, maintain operational excellence. We are taking a proactive approach to evaluate and refine our processes, ensuring they remain strong and well positioned for continued success.

In our discussions, FedEx comes to mind. FedEx was once widely regarded as a pioneer in operational excellence. Its meticulously engineered workflows and hub-and-spoke network set the global standard for overnight delivery, making “absolutely, positively overnight” a reality for decades. However, even systems and workflows as sophisticated as those used by FedEx can become rigid over time. Legacy processes struggle to adapt to today’s volatility, real-time expectations, and AI-empowered competitors. This rigidity has made overnight delivery less of a guaranteed differentiator, forcing FedEx to embark on a sweeping transformation—investing billions in automation, AI-driven routing, and predictive analytics to remain competitive in an environment where agility is everything.

Connecting Patients to their Prescribed Medications is the Mission and the Measure of Everything We Do.

2026 isn’t going to make that mission easier for patients and providers. We need to re-engineer our systems and processes so we can transform the patient experience.

Our Use Case and Future State

To transform the patient experience, we must first transform the infrastructure and workflows supporting it. Our future state is not just about modernization and incorporating ad hoc pilots for artificial intelligence (AI). Our future state is a new architecture centered on intelligent, integrated, real-time workflows and systems.

Our transformational approach focuses on key elements:

• Streamline Patient Access. Reduce administrative delays, optimize benefit investigation workflows, and eliminate redundant steps so patients receive therapy faster.
• Unify and Modernize our Data and Analytics. Move towards an even more cohesive analytics ecosystem that supports predictive models and operational visibility.
• Leverage AI and Automation. Deploy AI to streamline workflows, automate repetitive tasks, minimize the potential for errors, and guide agents with next-best actions.
• Boost User Adoption and Efficiency. Give teams intuitive, modern tools that reduce cognitive overload so they can spend more time supporting patients and less time navigating systems.
• Enable Rapid Implementation and Scalability. Adopt modern scalable systems that allow us to build new programs and add enhancements quickly with minimal need for custom development.
• Strengthen Compliance and Data Security. Work to ensure nothing we rearchitect compromises trust. Security, privacy, and compliance remain foundational in our design process.

Our Anticipated Outcomes

While we will benefit operationally from gains in efficiency, cost savings, and empowered teams, ultimately our transformation is not about technology – it's about patients.

Our future patient experience will be:

• Streamlined and empathetic. We will reduce patient frustration and anxiety with optimized workflows designed around core patient principles.
• Insightful. With the use of AI-empowered workflows and tools, we will have data that is easier to access and more insightful to the teams helping patients navigate their journey.
• Connected and frictionless. More fully integrated systems will enable faster case progression, improved communications, and minimized delays.
• Personalized and real-time. Data-driven interactions ensure each patient receives timely individualized support.

Why Patient-Centered Design Matters

Behind every system, CRM, or workflow is a patient – an empowered patient living in the era where personal health is managed based on individual priorities and in consultation with physicians is needed. To achieve the best outcomes, systems and ways of working need to be optimized around the priorities of the ultimate stakeholder – the patient.